John Mayer JohnMayerBlogHope01.jpgJohn Mayer is expressing his hope for the future and why he's supporting Barack Obama for president in a blog on The Huffington Post website.

John writes that as a person in his early twenties in the time following 9/11, hope and optimism were hard to come by:

    The social and political narrative of the last eight years, if you're a young adult, has been "you are the first generation of the second half of the rest of human existence." That's a huge psychological undertaking, and I believe it's one that will someday be diagnosed on a massive scale as having led to a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Something has to explain away our premature obsession with 1980s nostalgia.) My generation has come to know itself as the generation that should have seen the good days, my, were they spectacular, now take off your shoes and place them on the belt.


John contends that Obama's message of 'hope' is more than just a political catch phrase, but that it is the encouragement America's youth needs to get out and do something, and not just sit around, 'waiting for the world to change.'

    To those who question whether hope is a tangible product worth building a campaign around, I'd say take a look at despair and how powerful that has been in reshaping how people think and live. I believe the definition of the "hope" that Barack Obama enthuses operates on the unspoken thesis that there has to be a polar opposite to the despair of 9/11. Because if we accept that there's not, the will to live becomes forever altered. To adults who will vote for him, Barack Obama represents a return to prosperity. To the youth, he represents an introduction to it.